I think the point is that the actions of God are qualitatively different at different times -- loaves and fishes are multiplied, fig trees are cursed and die.
In short, sometimes God works miracles and this is what you mean by "active intervention". I have some trouble with describing only miracles as "active". Why assume God is inactive between one miracle and the next? But let that pass for now.
The pertinent question is why this insistence on making miracles part of science?
Have you read much in medieval philosophy? I find it fascinating. And there is a parallel in the 13th century to what we are discussing here. A key factor in prompting discussion was two formal condemnations of certain ideas as heresy. All were ideas taken from Aristotle and made current in Europe via Muslim philosophy. The condemned ideas referred to the eternal existence of the universe (contra creation), the sufficiency of natural causes (contra miracles), the unity of substance and accidents (contra transubstantiation) and that the soul is the form of a living body (contra the immortality of the soul). As these condemnations were absorbed and the philosophical consequences explored, we find a rise in skepticism. Not about church doctrine to be sure, but about the limits of human reason.
Consider this situation. You are sitting at a table, in good light,looking directly at a tangerine. You are awake and alert, not under the influence of drugs or anything else that might distort your senses. Would you say that you know you are looking at a tangerine on the table in front of you?
Can you know this? Can you be certain your experience of the tangerine is due to its physical presence? Could it not be due to God's "active intervention" affecting your optic nerve so that you experience the sight of the tangerine without the physical presence of a tangerine?
A scientist conducts a chemical experiment which requires burning a small amount of material. Does it burn because he puts it in the flame of his bunsen burner or because God "actively intervenes" to cause it to burn? How is the scientist to know if the material burns sometimes or never or always because God "actively intervenes"?
If God regularly and predictably actively intervenes such that a given process always produces a given result, how does this active intervention differ from natural process? For all we know it
is natural process. In describing the natural process, the scientist is describing the regular and predictable intervention that God
always makes in this situation. For all we know, the only difference between a normal experience and a miracle is not a difference in how active God is, but that normally God intervenes in a regular and predictable pattern and in a miracle he acts in an exceptional and unpredictable way.
Now let's play this out a bit more. What is it that science studies if not those active interventions of God that fall into a regular and predictable pattern? What else is it possible to study in a scientific manner? Can one predict an exception to habitual behaviour? What does one learn from God's exceptional behaviour about God's habitual behaviour? If, in any sense, a series of miracles conformed to a pattern, they would no longer be exceptional cases and would be included in science as one pattern of regularity among others. But the whole point of a miracle is that it is precisely what one cannot expect, cannot predict and from which no insight into future action can be inferred. It is a wholly free act of a sovereign God. It is for this reason that it is not and cannot be included in science.
Of course, we don't have to subscribe to the thesis that every ordinary sensory experience is actually due to God actively manipulating the material world and/or our sensory apparatus. The point is that even if that were the case, science would still be restricted to studying those interventions which occur in a regular predictable pattern.
How do you go from an observation (or even a series) to "always"?
"Always" within the framework of the observation. So long as the observation continues in the same pattern, the causal factor is always there. If God is a causal factor, God is always there. When the causal factor is absent the observation changes in character.
As an infinite quantity, in terms of mercy and love and possibility, speaking those things that are not as if they were. Not always in my time, in what expect, but with certainty.
Very romantic. But until it is quantifiable it is not science.
Really, I don't mean to be flippant. What you allude to is actually far more important than science. But that is not a reason to make it science or include it in science.
I get this feeling of creationist ambiguity about science that I noted in a post to laptoppop. You seem to long to enlarge science to include these very important things as if that would give a cachet of respectability to them they would not otherwise have. You seem to have trouble with science not being able to grasp important things like mercy and love and infinite possibilities.
Why can these things not be honoured and respected in themselves without the addition of science's seal of approval? Why is it so difficult to accept that science
is limited in the range of knowledge it can give us?
There are any number of examples of scientists who were gifted professionally because of their faith and reliance upon God.
I have no doubt some gifted scientists had faith in and relied on God, but to say their professional success was a result of their faith cannot be established as certain, or even highly probable, knowledge.
Of what benefit is their testimony to secular science? Many simply won't accept them.
It is not a matter of not accepting their testimony. It is that there is no means of verifying a causal nexus between their faith and their success. That is why their testimony is testimony and not data. And why we may choose to believe or disbelieve it. If it were data, it could not be ignored.
How one regards your "variable" is of course a very interesting problem. It causes huge fights in churches, since if you put forth some kind of equation or hypothesis and you don't get the blessing, someone has to get blamed apparently, whether it is God or the person praying with no results. Again, we come to a moral problem that is like the tail wagging the dog. But, once again, the reality of a God of infinite love remains and no amount of worry about who gets blamed if He doesn't do a trick will suffice to remove infinite love and infinite power as something potential or available or hidden or whatever. No equation can contain it.
Exactly, so why do you object to science not including it? Science can only deal with what can be contained in an equation. That is the nature of the beast.
Personally, I think the problem that science has with God is often a problem of bad scientists.
Personally, I don't think it is science that has the problem with God.
Science wants to determine what is real or what is possible.
Within its field, yes. But that field is a slice of reality, not all of it. And even then, science looks at what is regular, patterned and predictable, not potential invasions from other aspects of reality.
